Exploring the specificity of age-related differences in theory of mind tasks.

Tasks assessing theory of mind (ToM) and non-mental state control tasks were administered to young and older adults to examine previous contradictory findings about age differences in mental state decoding. Age differences were found on a verbal ToM task after controlling for vocabulary levels. Older adults achieved significantly lower scores than did younger adults on static and dynamic visual ToM tasks, and a similar pattern was found on non-ToM control tasks. Rather than a specific ToM deficit, older adults exhibited a more general impairment in the ability to decode cues from verbal and visual information about people.